Islands in the Sea
by ncfan
Summary: To err is human, especially when the Ishida clan is put in the position of having to deal with each other. Sometimes, however, they manage to get it right.


**Characters**: Ryuuken, Uryuu, Soken, Sayuri (OC).**  
Pairings**: mentioned IshiHime.**  
Warnings/Spoilers**: Spoilers for all arcs.**  
Timeline**: Runs through pre-manga to the events of the manga. The events depicted in this oneshot are in chronological order.**  
Author's Note**: One starts to wonder what my obsession with this family means. All it means to me is that I'm paying attention to something that a lot of people don't; most in the Bleach fandom go for the IchiRuki pairing or the IchiHime pairings as their favorite thing to write about, at least as far as I've observed. Instead, I go for the pair that could win the "Broken Father-Son Dynamic" of the Year Award.**  
Disclaimer**: I don't own Bleach.

* * *

There was a large quilted blanket spread across the living room floor, with squares in bright patterns of red and blue and purple and gold, floral patterns and geometric, all on one bright quilt. The hot summer sunlight was bleeding all over the house, to the extent that even the ceiling fan and central cooling couldn't entirely block out the sweltering heat.

If there was one thing that Ryuuken could not pretend to understand, it was the inner workings of the mind of his eight-month old son. Ryuuken failed to comprehend how Uryuu, who was less than a year old, still tiny, not yet speaking and barely walking, could be so utterly mystifying (The quality lived on throughout the years, with Ryuuken alternating between believing that he had Uryuu's behavior down to a science, and that he really didn't know his son at all).

When Ryuuken expected Uryuu to do one thing, the child ended up doing exactly what Ryuuken _didn't_ expect him to do. Granted, it was only with the little wooden blocks that morning, colors painted smooth and bright and childishly jarring, that Uryuu was choosing to astound his father, but still…

It was early July, hot and bright with the skin of leaves and trees starting to peel off in crumpled heaps from the sheer blazing heat. Karakura Town seemed to be caught in a giant, shimmering mosquito net that made everyone lethargic and indolent, unwilling to work, to the extent that even Ryuuken had decided to take the morning off and come into work at noon, an exceedingly rare occurrence.

Ryuuken was further surprised when Uryuu suddenly left off with playing with his blocks and toddled towards his father, and crawled up onto him like Ryuuken was a climbing frame. "Well, what's this about?" he murmured, as a familiar pair of tiny, pudgy hands, slightly sticky, somewhat moist latched around his neck and the familiar weight fell against his chest, a miniscule heartbeat, like the rise and fall of the river against its banks, making itself heard.

"I think he likes you."

Sayuri sat down beside them, bestowing a small smile on her husband and her small child as her clear blue eyes sparkled in that strange mixture of humor and happiness, like fireflies at dusk in the dog days of summer, that expression that Ryuuken had (and he would _never_ admit it to anyone but her, and never in public) always found so fascinating. He returned the smile, small and reserved, as he gave his answer.

"He should," Ryuuken muttered, voice quiet and hushed. "We live in the same house; it would be very awkward if we didn't like each other."

A small laugh followed this, as Sayuri rested her hand on Uryuu's back. "Over twenty years we've known each other, and one thing about you has never failed to stay consistent, Ryuuken. You still have no idea how to take a joke."

"Consider it one of my fatal flaws."

Sayuri rubbed her hand along her child's small back. "He must be tired, I suppose." At that moment, Uryuu chose to get up and go back to playing with his blocks. His mother sighed. "Or not." She shot a teasing look at him. "I guess Uryuu just thought you weren't feeling the love," she giggled.

"Oh, like you last night?" Ryuuken was rather proud of that display of wit, until a small, bony elbow dug sharply into his ribs. For a small woman, Sayuri could hit _hard_. Years of training with her family had ensured that.

"Not in front of the baby," she hissed, though the amused expression remained, looking more like spring than summer in the morning light of the living room.

Ryuuken followed her lead, getting into yet _another_ lively debate concerning semantics with his wife. "Yes, a baby. Uryuu is just that, Sayuri, a baby that has absolutely no idea what we are talking about."

She rolled her eyes playfully; he was the straight man to her admittedly sometimes hard to understand humor. "And you know this how? For all we know, Uryuu could be soaking in every word like a sponge to use to blackmail us later, so watch what you say around our son."

He leaned over and kissed the top of her head, murmuring, "Whatever you say, Sayuri," careful not to seem placatory, because that would just set them off again.

Sayuri nodded, sheet of thick, fine black hair shaking over her face. She started up another strain of conversation, her eyes following Uryuu with the sort of motherly protectiveness that had sprung up without warning, inexplicably. "Have you seen Isshin and Masaki lately?"

"Yes," Ryuuken answered automatically. "A couple of days ago."

"Masaki's gotten so big! The baby's due any day now, she says. Have either one of them told you what they plan on naming the baby, because when I asked Isshin, he wouldn't say anything."

"No, they haven't told me." And in truth, Ryuuken wasn't half as concerned as Sayuri concerning the matter; he'd find out what Isshin planned on naming his son when the child was born. Ryuuken supposed it was one of those "female" things Isshin liked to wax eloquent about—not that he had ever listened to Isshin once he got too drunk to enunciate and even pronounce monosyllabic words correctly. Somehow, being designated driver to Kurosaki Isshin always managed to run the gamut of heaven, purgatory, and pure and utter _hell_ in the space of a few short hours.

At that moment, Uryuu took the opportunity to hand one of the blocks to his mother, a bright smile on his round, babyish face. "That's very good, sweetheart," Sayuri assured him.

"I think he's going to be left-handed, Sayuri, like you and my father," Ryuuken pointed out. "Let's hope he takes after you in more that just that."

"What do you mean?"

Ryuuken touched the frames of his glasses nervously. Sayuri noticed and groaned. "For the last time, stop being so self-conscious about the glasses." She grinned suggestively. "And _I_, for one, happen to think they look very good on you."

"Uhh—"

Again, Uryuu managed to interject in the conversation, this time in a way that neither of his parents could ignore, snatching Ryuuken's glasses right off of his face and examining them intently in the way that only a baby could.

Sayuri seemed to think there was something intensely amusing about all of this, as she burst into a high-pitched stream of laughing. "Yes, Daddy's glasses are fascinating, Uryuu, but he needs them back, because without them, Daddy can't see a foot in front of his face." She gently wrested the glasses from the fingers that were barely a fraction the length of her own, and handed them back to Ryuuken.

Ryuuken held up his glasses to the light and sighed. "I think he smudged the lenses," he muttered, wiping his glasses against his shirt before putting them on.

Laughter was replaced by seriousness. "Ryuuken. I was wanting to take Uryuu and go visit your father today."

The one subject that was always guaranteed to cause tension between them.

"Sayuri… You know Soken and I don't get along."

"_Ryuuken_… He's Uryuu's grandfather, for God's sake; I think he has a right to have a role in Uryuu's life. And quite frankly, I want to make sure he's alright; the house he lives in doesn't have any central heating or cooling, and do you know how high the mercury's gotten lately?"

In the end, whether fortunately or unfortunately, the chances of Ryuuken saying "no" to her in any matters short of life or death, were pretty much nil. So that tended to make any arguments half-hearted and amazingly short. "Okay." Ryuuken shook his head. "Tell the old man I said hello."

"Will do." She stood up, and placed a light hand on Ryuuken's shoulder. "I'll see you when you get home from the hospital, I guess."

He nodded. "I suppose so."

The sounds of Sayuri gently picking Uryuu up, gathering bag and bottle and stepping out of the front door were dissonant like a piano off-key, and the moment the door closed as light as a whisper behind her, Ryuuken wished he had said goodbye.

.

The days went down like Masaki's rosary beads when she dutifully said her prayers, day by day by day by day, the musical clink ticking away the hours.

Isshin and Masaki's first child was born on what would be the hottest day of the year, just after sunset when the mercury still reached unbelievable heights and humidity congealed on the windows like sweat.

Ryuuken made good on the threat he had made the previous autumn and gave Isshin a hard time the entire time they were in the waiting room, yet at the same time, Ryuuken spent most of his time comfortingly rubbing his jittery friend's back. There were some things that created an instant bond of sympathy. Sayuri too made good on a promise she had made, staying with Masaki through the entire birthing and afterwards as well, in return for the kindness Masaki had shown her eight months before.

Autumn came, and Uryuu was a year old. At Sayuri's insistence, Ryuuken let Soken come over. Ryuuken was loath to admit it, but he enjoyed his father's company that night, and Uryuu did seem to take to Soken with remarkable ease.

When winter fell and the world was crystal white, locked in ice and snow, Sayuri died. When Ryuuken was led by the police to identify her body, lying deep in the snow as if merely asleep, all he saw was her closed eyes and blue lips, and the memory flashing beneath his eyelids like blinding pinwheels that seared his vision, that he hadn't said goodbye to her that day.

Ryuuken wasn't sure what to do.

He wasn't sure whether to live, mourn, weep, continue to survive despite everything, or simply stop breathing, and wait for the darkness to come and swallow him up as it had done her. And even then, it wouldn't have satisfied him, because his death would have been more merciful than hers had been.

It was an accepted fact among any Quincy clan, that few of their kind would end their lives in any way but a violent one, that life would always be painful short and ephemeral. Soken had been the first of the Ishida clan to live to see old age, and in all likelihood he would be the last. But Ryuuken couldn't accept that truth. He didn't know how.

Uryuu was the only solace in Ryuuken's life, but in the aftermath, he could put no heart into anything he did with his son, closing off, drifting further and further away, withering away like a plant denied water, until he was barely recognizable as the man he had once been.

In the years afterwards, if Ryuuken managed to remember what life had been like, he would look at himself, fifteen years younger, and wonder who the stranger wearing his face had been, dancing a lively dance when Ryuuken's feet had become sore and rooted to the ground.

.

_The Hollow had screamed like something out of the darkest recesses of Hell, where nightmares were born and even the Devil feared to walk, and Uryuu had wondered how on Earth those who could see what was writhing before them lived with the knowledge, of what existed in the dark shadows and in such ordinary places._

Hollow attacks always robbed Uryuu of sleep afterwards, chasing it away with a fervency that shocked the young boy as much as anything in life could.

It was dark in his room, the shadows of inky midnight playing across his wall in a wicked dance, nearly alive in all the disjointed, chaotic movements.

In a sharp, shallow gust of breath and a rustle of starched linen sheets, Uryuu was out of bed, on his feet and breathing hard, standing still for a moment.

Then, he moved through the stew of darkness to gently push open the door.

It was a short, quiet walk to Father's room in the chill hall, the carpet muffling the noise of his feet like footsteps in fresh snowfall, even though it was only spring.

Father was asleep. Slumber robbed his face of some of its severity, though not all of it, and Uryuu, despite this not being the first time he had done this, was still just as apprehensive and just as fearful of being caught as he had been the first time.

Quiet as a mouse, trying desperately to keep as much of his weight off of the bed as possible, Uryuu crawled into the bed under the sheets and settled in, burrowing under with just his head sticking out from under the coverlet.

It was a tense moment when Father woke up.

Brown eyes settled on Uryuu, slightly bleary, taking a moment to readjust and drink in the situation. Uryuu's heart hammered in his chest as his eyes became affixed to his father's sleep-heavy face. In that moment, he came to realize that he was scared half to death of the man next to him.

Father did nothing to try and send him back to his own room. Instead, a hand gently ran down the back of his head and settled between his shoulder blades, a gesture clearly meant to be soothing, as Father closed his eyes and sank back down into sleep, his breathing evening out, without ever saying a word.

After a moment, Uryuu did the same. Until he was finally able to rest and sleep, he laid his head against his father's chest and listened to his heartbeat, small fingers clinging to the material of his shirt.

.

"Uryuu." Ryuuken's voice was as harsh and snappish as sandpaper running across wood, without meaning for it to be that way. "What happened to your hands?"

The four-year-old boy's face colored, as he ducked his head, his wide glasses lenses shimmering with guilt and embarrassment, contrite at being caught by his father.

Uryuu's fingers looked as though they had been recently flayed, or close to it. The skin was hanging in tatters, except the bits of loose skin looked as though they'd been pulled off, and instead there was redness everywhere, bits of blood and tissue mixing in with his alabaster skin.

Ryuuken motioned him to the sink and pulled out a roll of bandages, cotton balls and disinfectant. As Uryuu washed his hands under the freezing water, he half-whispered, avoiding his father's sharp brown eyes, "I was climbing the tree outside of Grandfather's house when I tripped on the branches and scratched my hands."

It was a lie. Ryuuken knew how Uryuu's hands had gotten so raw and bloody, remembered how gory his hands had gotten the first few times he formed a spirit bow and tried to pull it back. For the moment, Ryuuken did not address the matter at hand, keeping a calm face over anger and confusion.

_I thought I had made my wishes perfectly clear…_

Uryuu dried his hands and sat down at the kitchen table, holding out his hands at Ryuuken's request. Uryuu squirmed and whimpered in pain as Ryuuken applied the disinfectant—rubbing alcohol—over the blemished skin of his hands, and Ryuuken found himself softly murmuring, "I'm almost done. This will help, I promise."

The process of winding bandages around Uryuu's fingers was completed with relative ease and Ryuuken was soon finished.

As Uryuu was leaving the kitchen, Ryuuken called after him, "Don't think I don't know when you're lying to me, Uryuu."

The little boy stiffened and turned around, fear in his eyes.

Ryuuken didn't leave off there, the syllables flitting around in the air with anything _but_ a semblance of warmth, any pretense of detachment dissolving away like tissue paper soaked in water. "I don't want you going to your grandfather's house anymore, do you understand me?" Eyes were stern and hard and opaque as stained glass windows, voice stiff and adamant, carriage rigid with one hand clenching the edge of the kitchen table.

"But—"

"I mean it, Uryuu." Ryuuken didn't like his wishes for _his_ child to be circumvented in such a large way, cold anger's razor edge carving out the suddenly chilly air around them.

Uryuu bowed his head and nodded, hiding his face from his father's eye.

Later that night, after Uryuu was asleep and the fireflies were creating a blanket of stars closer to earth, Ryuuken made the short drive to Soken's house.

The old man was leaning over a stove with a bowl of rice sitting on one of the wrought iron stations, paying special care to make sure that none of the rice grains were burned or seared around the edges. Ryuuken didn't bother to knock as he stepped, quick and quiet with the efficiency of his walk perfectly intact, into the tiny house.

"Father." The single word was flatly spoken, with little to no inflection leaning towards either end of the emotional roller coaster.

Soken looked up, startled, and smiled warmly. "Hello, Ryuuken. I haven't seen you in a while; why don't you sit down? I was just about to have supper anyway."

Ryuuken did not sit down, did not attempt to make himself comfortable with his surroundings. "Father, you have been teaching Uryuu Quincy techniques."

Surprisingly, or maybe not, Soken didn't appear as guilty as Uryuu had, like a cat caught with its paw deep in the fish bowl. Soken nodded. "Yes, I have. He's old enough to learn, and since your time is taken up at the hospital, I decided to teach him myself." Soken went on, smiling fondly into the pot of rice. "Uryuu's an apt pupil; I think he may be progressing more quickly than you did at that age."

"Stop." The word was as frigid as freezing rain in the midst of January, cold and terse.

Soken looked up at that, the smile starting to fade from his face, heavily lined and deeply ingrained with wrinkles like the knotted trunk of the oak tree outside. "Excuse me?" he asked, still mild.

"I don't want you teaching him those things," Ryuuken repeated flatly, the bite of anger just barely introducing itself.

What left Ryuuken feeling the beginning of rage was the sympathetic expression that came over Soken's face; _What right do you have to feel sympathy for me? You have always accepted death in a way both monstrous and callous, and do not pity me for being incapable of accepting death as an eventuality, the way you did._

"Ryuuken, he's at risk. Hollows are drawn to beings with high reiatsu, whether living or dead. There are some things inherited that you simply can not avoid." A look of pain shot over the skin that time had left deeply abused. "I don't want to see Uryuu end his life caught in a Hollow's maw—as I'm sure you don't."

The unspoken words were there, the reminder of who _else_ had ended their life that way, and Ryuuken closed his eyes for a long moment, and pretended he hadn't heard that silent jab. If he acknowledged what he had heard between his father's words, he would lose his temper, lose all his self-control.

"At least let me teach Uryuu to the extent that he'll be capable of defending himself, for when the day comes that he is attacked." To Soken, it was not a matter of _if_ Uryuu would ever be attacked by a Hollow, but rather, an issue of _when_ that day would come. It was to Ryuuken as well, but he handled the knowledge differently.

"No." The tone brooked no opposition, made Ryuuken's position perfectly clear.

"You won't always be there, Ryuuken."

At that point, Ryuuken snapped, in a small way that only made his eyes blaze with a cold fire and his voice snarl like an aggressive cat backed into a corner. "What sort of father do you take me for, that you think me incapable of protecting my son? My past failures—" Ryuuken's voice caught and he ducked his head for a second, before sucking his breath back into his lungs and continuing. "My past failures are in the past. I will not let it happen again. _Never_ again."

Soken reached and gently touched the top of his son's hand, which Ryuuken promptly retracted with a swiftness that was clear in what it implied. His sympathy did not wane. "Uryuu will most likely outlive you, my son, as you will outlive me." Ryuuken had to think about the silver strands then, the silver strands that were, in increasing number, gathering in his hair, prematurely gray at the temples for a thirty-three year old man. "You can protect him now, I don't dispute that, but what happens after you die?"

Ryuuken chose that moment to leave. As he was stepping out of the front door, hand bracing on the storm door, he threw the words back: "I've made this very clear. Do not teach Uryuu anything more than you already have. I don't want him sucked into that life."

And Ryuuken wasn't the only one with parting words. "The life will call him, Ryuuken, whether you like it or not. This is a heritage that is impossible to walk away from."

On this matter, Uryuu and Soken, for whatever reason, continued to go behind Ryuuken's back, training in the way of the Quincy. Ryuuken kept telling himself that he would put his foot down tomorrow, but tomorrow never came, and Ryuuken let it go on, for once remembering his father's words.

.

The day after Grandfather died, Uryuu's eyes were still red and raw. The summer air hit his face too harshly, the stagnant breeze stinking of phantom blood as almost everything did. Uryuu had no appetite and had felt the world spin and his stomach heave at the smell of the toast Father had made; Father had enough tact and enough common sense not to ask if Uryuu was hungry.

He had fallen asleep with his head pressed against Father's side, sleep uneasy and troubled, the nightmares more vivid than the monsters of his toddlerhood had ever been. And when Uryuu woke up, he wasn't in his bed, but with Father in the chair in the living room, a pair of arms wrapped around his back.

In the early morning, he was stiff and terribly dry-eyed. And Uryuu was playing witness to something more: Father's callousness. Father, who behaved as though nothing had happened the day before, as though everything was normal and status quo. Father, who acted as though Grandfather had never existed, blotting him away from existence like a stain on the tablecloth.

_How can he act like this…Doesn't he care at all…Sensei's dead…Why isn't he more upset…How can he be so cruel…_

He couldn't understand, just as he couldn't understand how Father could witness Hollow attacks and not react, just stand there and let the dead be mauled and devoured by hungry ghosts. Uryuu couldn't understand how anyone could bear to watch a soul, living or dead, be destroyed.

Uryuu stepped out of the front door when the school bus started to come down the street. His father's voice called from behind him, and when he looked back, Father was standing in the doorway, hands on the rim.

"Uryuu…your grandfather knew what he was doing, what he was getting himself into. Don't grieve too much for someone who gives their life away."

Uryuu felt his shoulders shake, his teeth clench.

"It would have happened to him eventually. You were better off staying where you were."

_Don't…say it…Don't say it…_

Then, Father did something that Uryuu couldn't possibly have seen coming out of him. Father leaned down on his knees, the movement quick and fluid yet strangely old and aching; it was difficult for him to do so, and Uryuu noticed for the first time that Father's hair was almost entirely gray, the brown strands barely existing anymore amongst the tarnished silver. Father wasn't an old man, yet time had decided to be his bane. Father leaned forwards and pulled Uryuu to him in a surprisingly gentle hug.

"It'll be alright," Father murmured, over Uryuu's shoulder. "You might not think so now, but it will be."

On the surface, it looked like things between them might be alright after a while, that Grandfather's death would wound their relationship but not be the cause of its expiration.

In truth, Grandfather's death had utterly destroyed what chance Uryuu and his father might have had for some semblance of normalcy in their relationship.

.

Uryuu killed his first Hollow when he was twelve.

Ryuuken was awake to hear his son sneaking out of the house at ten twenty seven at night. He did nothing. He was still awake to watch from a window as, at one fifteen in the morning, Uryuu dragged himself back into the house, exhausted, shoulders bowed, pristine white clothing clotted with blood, thin, strangely delicate body riddled with bruises and cuts. Ryuuken pretended he couldn't hear or see, that the darkness swallowed Uryuu up and made him invisible, and waited until the morning.

Uryuu's presence at the kitchen table was marked by bags under his eyes and a pale, strained face. He ate his cereal with painful slowness, as if it was all ash in his mouth.

Drinking out of a mug of black coffee, Ryuuken eyed a particularly long cut on Uryuu's right arm. Without warning, he said, "You're lucky it wasn't worse."

The spoon went down into the bowl with a sharp clink; Uryuu's hand had went slack, his body rigid with shock, tension and apprehension all at once. He looked up at him, his blue eyes, so painfully like his mother's, widening. Every expression Uryuu wore looked so much like his mother's lately, that it left a knife twisting deep inside of the heart of the man who had loved her, and Ryuuken knew this wouldn't stop, no matter how much he wished it could, because it was all unconscious.

"I always know where you are, Uryuu. Never forget that."

"You can't stop me." The words were impulsively spoken, a trait Sayuri had shared, and stubborn, which was one of Ryuuken's more infamous character traits.

Without realizing it, Ryuuken felt his hackles rise, and his voice snapping out in a fashion he was not accustomed to, short and angry, crumpling with something like emotion. "Do you want to die the way your grandfather did?" Ryuuken asked sharply. His control began to disintegrate. "The way your mother did?"

What happened next left Ryuuken genuinely appalled.

Uryuu's face suddenly contorted in an expression of shadowed horror, shell-shocked surprise; he looked like he had just been sucker-punched. "_That's _how Mother died?" His voice shook like the earth when tectonic plates shifted.

At that moment, Ryuuken realized that out of all the questions Uryuu had asked as a child, one had always been left out.

.

The front door slammed in Ryuuken's face, disgruntled and indignant, as his son had been when he left out of the door.

Ryuuken didn't expect it to last long. A thirteen-year-old couldn't survive in the world on his own for long. It might kill Uryuu's pride to do it, but eventually, soon, he would be back.

At the same time, the empty house suddenly seemed much larger than it was supposed to, and the thought that Uryuu might not come back bothered Ryuuken more than it should have.

.

Months later, Uryuu received a package from Ryuuken, containing a photograph of his mother and a copy of _The Great Gatsby_.

While flipping through the book, a folded bit of paper, larger than the note Ryuuken had left, fell out of the book, fluttering to the carpet floor of the apartment like a dying bird.

It was an old piece of lined paper, yellowing around the edges. Frowning, Uryuu leaned down and gently scooped it up in his hand, unfolding the paper.

On the paper was a letter, written in a small, feminine hand. A voice seemed to rise from the depths of the smooth paper, clear and light with a delicate inflection.

_Uryuu,_

_I figure, that if you're reading this, then it means I didn't live long enough for us to have this conversation. Don't worry too much about me. I always knew I wasn't going to go peacefully, and what I regret more than anything is not living to see you grow up._

_Mother?_ Uryuu's inner voice was choked with shock, as he read on, with bated breath to see what his long dead mother had left behind for him.

_I'm about to tell you a pretty funny story; well, funny as far as I'm concerned. Your father will probably never tell you this because, as far as __he's__ concerned, it's anything but funny. But I figure you should know how your parents met._

_During the summer, when I was nine years old, I, my parents, my older brother and my father's uncle (all that was left of our once large clan) went to a part of the river close to where we lived. It was a popular destination for families in the summer, and I always liked swimming._

_Well, near the tree where my mother and my uncle liked to rest, there was a ledge. This ledge was only about a six inch drop 'til you hit the water, and I liked to use it to jump into the river._

_There were already a few families there, and among them was a small boy, my age, with brown hair and glasses, accompanied by a woman whom I assumed was his mother but later turned out to only be a family friend._

_The boy was standing on the ledge, staring down into the water with this look on his face that indicated he was trying to work up the courage to jump but couldn't quite manage it. Well, your dearly departed uncle decided to help him with that._

_My brother Yuya was seventeen at the time, and like most seventeen-year-olds was prone to doing spur of the moment, stupid things. As he was walking past the kid, without warning, he shoved him and sent the boy flying into the river._

_Apparently, he either couldn't swim or couldn't swim very well. He spluttered around, thrashing and making an all around fool of himself until I waded into the river and pointed out that where he was, the water was only knee-deep. That boy was your father, and needless to say, Ryuuken was not feeling particularly good about himself at that moment._

_I met him again when we had the same fifth grade class. He refused to look me in the eye for the first two weeks of school until I pointed out that I'd never caught his name. Assured that I didn't think of him as an idiot, we became friends from that point on._

_I fail to see why your father doesn't want __anyone__ to know how we met._

_Your mother,_

_Ishida Sayuri_

Uryuu managed a shaky smile, at a loss for anything intelligent to say. "Mother…Mother…"

.

"Is this your son?" Ryuuken heard the man ask, through a distance of a thousand miles and an ocean separating the two of them.

"Yes, he is." His own voice was a hoarse mask of itself, absent, barely above a whisper. "How bad…are his injuries?"

They were in a hospital outside of Karakura Town, well after dark, and Ryuuken was staring into a darkened room, where Uryuu was asleep on a bed, hooked up to an IV with his glasses lying on a table nearby.

"Not life-threatening," the other doctor whispered. "He has a couple of bruised ribs, and several strange lacerations—I've never seen such patterns. I've written a prescription for antibiotics and pain medicine; he's just staying overnight for observation. I'll send him home in the morning. He wouldn't say, but I think your son was probably attacked by fellow students. Shall I…leave you?"

Ryuuken nodded absently, and he was left alone, standing in the doorway, staring into the room, where Uryuu was asleep and unaware of his presence.

It was a Hollow attack, not the result of a schoolyard bully.

Uryuu had grown somewhat; he was fourteen and a half now, and it had been over a year since Ryuuken had last laid eyes on him. He seemed taller, the baby fat completely gone from his painfully thin, lean body; the bones stuck out from his thin, fragile wrists, like bones on the wings of a bird. His face was grown narrow, and, Ryuuken realized, looked more like his own in terms of structure than it did Sayuri's. Uryuu still had his mother's raven-colored hair and extremely fair skin though, pale and translucent, to the point that veins were almost visible.

Ryuuken sighed, and stepped away from the darkness back into the antiseptic light of the hallway, not wanting to be there when Uryuu opened his eyes.

He hated to admit it, but it hurt to know that he could only watch him when he was asleep.

.

As the botched Arrancar screamed and writhed, a huge mass hitting the night-darkened street, Ryuuken's eyes met Uryuu's. The boy was shaken but unhurt.

"That was unsightly of you, Uryuu."

And with that, they came back into each other's lives, and were again left to wonder if they loved each other too much, not enough, or not at all.

.

"Ah, you're awake, good."

Uryuu groaned as he struggled to his feet, peering around blearily and reaching for his glasses. Ryuuken handed the pair—he'd taken the liberty of going up and having them repaired while Uryuu was unconscious—back to the badly beaten teenager.

"What did you do?" Uryuu muttered, fingering the fresh, livid scar on his chest as he struggled to his feet, legs shaking like jelly. He put a hand to his forehead and winced; Ryuuken briefly wondered if he had sustained a concussion, but put the thought out of his mind.

Ryuuken folded his arms across his chest and shot a critical, scrutinizing look at Uryuu, who pretended not to notice. "Notice anything different?" His voice dripped sarcasm.

Uryuu did notice. His eyes widened. Then he glared, almost sullenly, at Ryuuken. "You could have warned me."

"What did you think I had done?" Ryuuken scoffed.

The boy cast a long, measured look at his father, and Ryuuken stiffened, wondering what would happen next. "I thought," Uryuu said, very quietly, his voice strangely soft, "that you had killed me, and put me out of your misery."

Though his face registered no surprise, Ryuuken's mind was screaming, and realized that neither one of them knew the other anymore.

.

"Get up. Get up!" Ryuuken seized the front of Uryuu's shirt and dragged him to his feet, uncaring if there were any injuries that he might aggravate with the short, ruthless action. Suddenly, he was irrationally angry, seething.

"The next time you attack me," Ryuuken snapped, meeting his son's burning eyes, "you do it in a way that you make _sure_ I can't fire back. This mercy of yours will have you dead before you come of age, do you understand?"

When, fifteen minutes later, Ryuuken was lying on his back, bleeding heavily and struggling to catch his breath from screaming lungs, Uryuu leaned over him, his face unnaturally pale.

"I'm sorry," Uryuu muttered, strangely, without rancor, "but there are times when mercy is something that is automatic, not thought out. That's why you're still alive."

They didn't hate each other; they couldn't claim to understand each other. In that moment, Ryuuken and Uryuu came closer to understanding each other and were never further from hating each other than they ever had before.

Ryuuken and Uryuu were alike in one defining way. Once they took a position and clung to it fiercely, they would never let go of it, hanging on stubbornly by the skin of their teeth until an outside source knocked senes into their heads. If that even happened.

.

_He's gone_…

Uryuu had gone to Hueco Mundo. Ryuuken realized for the first time that he might never see that familiar face again, and realized, as with Sayuri, that he had never said goodbye.

Ryuuken found himself incapable of saying goodbye.

.

In Hueco Mundo, Uryuu surprised himself by thinking of Ryuuken.

He was staring up at the smooth night sky, something inanimate yet more real than any sky he had ever seen on Earth or in Soul Society. The stars seemed to stare back down at him, the moon an accusing crescent, shimmering in a leftover haze from a daytime that was over an eternity past.

Uryuu thought of Ryuuken when he saw the dust devils pass, in a haze of sand and wind and insubstantial smoke, and wondered if Ryuuken had noticed that he was gone. Wondered what Ryuuken would do, how he would react, if Uryuu never came home.

Uryuu decided that he'd rather not contemplate the way Ryuuken would react if he was to never come back to Earth.

.

It was winter, and yet, as of then, there was no snow. Uryuu stared up at Earth's moon and Earth's stars, and realized how much he had missed them.

The echo of words exchanged between him and his friends resounded in the back of his mind, warm and welcome. Things were quiet for the moment (though would not remain so for long): they were all away from Hueco Mundo, though none of them were quite whole anymore.

At that moment, Uryuu didn't care about wholeness. He was just glad to be back from Hueco Mundo, and not back from Hueco Mundo in a pine box.

Uryuu felt his eyes water slightly as the smell of cigarette smoke came to him, and he flinched as he realized that Ryuuken was standing right beside him, leaning against the outside wall of Urahara's shop. Ryuuken coughed slightly, a smoker's cough, as he drew the cigarette away from his mouth.

Ryuuken turned his head and looked at him, eyes unreadable. "The thing about love," he murmured, voice curiously flat, "is that it always ends up wounding you in the end."

"Sir?" Uryuu frowned.

"That girl you were talking with." Ryuuken's voice was mercilessly quiet and even. "Inoue Orihime."

Uryuu's face colored, and he looked away.

"Love will always hurt you, Uryuu. Remember that. In the end, I'm not even sure that those emotions are worth it when the fallout comes and destroys everyone."

A sharp jolt of anger, the old, noxious, familiar emotions coming back over Uryuu as he bit his lip and willed himself not to react. _You don't know that…_

"Love destroy lives. It destroys people, nations, and entire worlds. It's the one sensation that can be linked to both deep joy and even greater sorrow. Sorrow outweighs everything in the end."

Uryuu jolted his feet to movement and stepped away from Ryuuken, standing in the alley, staring incredulously at him. "Do you really mean that?" Accusations were rife in his question, angry and disbelieving.

A monosyllabic answer, typical of both father and son, came out of Ryuuken's mouth. "Yes."

Uryuu shook his head and snarled. "Then why did you marry my mother?" His voice shook at that. It wasn't the question of a belligerent teenager. It was the entreaty of a child who was hurt and confused, and couldn't understand why his parent was acting that way.

Ryuuken looked down at the ground for a long moment. Only the sound of some far away owl broke the silence. Then he looked at his son, and his eyes were no less opaque than they had been before.

His voice was barely more than a whisper, a soft murmur laden down with emotion Uryuu had never heard there before. "I married your mother because I love her."

At that moment, Uryuu made several revelations, based on eight words.

_He said "love". Not "loved". Present tense, not past._

Ryuuken had never gotten over his grief. In fact, he had never processed it at all. It remained, raw and unbroken, as though Sayuri's death had occurred yesterday instead of over fifteen years ago. It wasn't healthy, and he hadn't lived like a normal human being since, going through the motions of life without really seeing any of it. Like a deaf man trying to listen to music, like a blind man trying to admire artwork. Nothing quite clicked anymore.

And for one moment, Uryuu caught a glimpse of the man his father had once been, instead of what he was now. He could soften, for a few moments at least, in the wake of that revelation. Forgiveness... that was less certain, and would be extremely difficult if either of them decided to go down that road.

"What you need to decide," Ryuuken continued, just as cold and frigid as he had been in the moments before his mask and slipped and fallen, though he couldn't hope to resurrect that façade now that it had fallen, "is whether whatever joy you take out of love is worth the sorrow you will inevitably feel after the one you love is gone." He started to walk back towards the side door into Urahara's shop.

Uryuu spurred on to put one final question before him. "Was it worth it?" he called after him.

Ryuuken didn't answer. He didn't have to. They both already knew what the answer was.

* * *

Just so you know, for the first section, my parents had that sort of conversation when my mother pointed out that I was left-handed (Apparently, I reached for my toys with my left hand when I was a baby and, sure enough, seventeen years later, I'm still doing everything with the left side of my body). My dad made a bad-tasting joke about having a length of rope in the closet; my mother was no more amused than I was when I found out.


End file.
